Veeam Backup Questions

[wczar]

Starting to look at Veeam to backup our VMware environment. We currently have 2 clusters (ESX 3.5 U4 and U5). VirtualCenter is 2.5 U6. We will be building 2 new 4.0 hosts in the near future and upgrading to vCenter 4. Although we have VCB licensed we just backup our Windows guests as if they were physical boxes using BrightStor. Not good ! Will the current release of Veeam Backup work with our "mixed" environment and would we need VCB after we upgrade to VMware ver 4. Also concerned whether Veeam Backup installs any agents on the guests or ESX hosts.

[Gostev]

Hello, Veeam Backup does not need VCB. Our native support vStorage API allows us to do everything VCB can do, and much more!

Yes, the current release will work in your environment out of box, and will continue to work after you upgrade to ESX4 (which would allow us to leverage additional powerful capabilities vSphere provides, such as ESX4 changed block tracking).

Hope this helps!

[wczar]

So then no Veeam agents get installed on ESX hosts or guests, no proxy server is required and we will not need VCB after we upgrade ESX and vCenter to vSphere ?

[Gostev]

That is correct, sorry I missed your question about agents.

We do not deploy or require persistent agents on either guests or hosts. We can optionally use temporary run-time helper process on "fat" ESX hosts, which helps us to speed up restore to fat ESX (this requires that you configure service console connection settings in ESX host's properties in Veeam console). Also, we can optionally use temporary run-time process with Windows guests, this process implements Veeam VSS (our advanced VSS implementation) and coordinates VM freeze activities.

Both of these are optional, disabled by default, but I recommend that you use them for best results. They are non-persistent runtime-only processes, which are installed and run automatically during backup/restore activities, and then stopped and removed immediately after backup/restore finishes, so they are not real full-blown agents, so not something you have to watch and manage.